"Fantastic Four" is a profound mess. It's not fun. It's not exciting. It's far from action-packed. And it's most certainly not fantastic.

A poorly constructed, ineptly executed, flatfooted piece of Branded Product that plays as though it were written by a piece of software fed every superhero movie script to date and instructed to synthesize them.

A lightweight and basically unnecessary attempt to once again bring some cinematic life to one of the lesser teams in the Marvel Universe.

Even with the human torch flaming on, Fantastic Four's fire only leads to a fantastic burn-out.